By JIM McCLEAN

KHI News Service

WASHINGTON -- Information about what patients think of the care they receive in the hospital is now on a federal Web site intended to help consumers make health care choices.

Starting Friday, information compiled from questions asked of thousands of hospital patients was available on the Hospital Compare consumer Web site.

"We know people are hungry for this information," said Herb Kuhn, acting deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. "People really want to know about the care their neighbors are getting at their local hospital."

Kuhn briefed reporters Friday at the Association of Health Care Journalists' annual meeting.

The Hospital Compare Web site was launched in 2005 using information collected by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to measure the quality of hospital care. Those measures include whether certain medicines are given quickly to heart attack patients to whether specific steps were taken to avoid infections in surgical patients.

The new information comes from a 27-question survey administered to patients soon after they leave a hospital. Patients are asked to comment on the cleanliness of the hospital, how well doctors and nurses communicated with them and the clarity of the instructions they received about how to manage their recovery once discharged.

Clear instructions

A patient cannot follow discharge instructions at home if they didn't understand them in the first place," said Dr. Carolyn Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which developed the questionnaire.

Clancy said that poor communication between providers and patients often leads to people being readmitted within two weeks of being discharged.

"This information provides a clear road map for hospitals to follow to improve communication," she said.

For example, patients ranked the University of Kansas Hospital above both the national and Kansas averages for how well nurses communicated, but ranked its doctors' communication skills slightly below average.

For now, only patients seen in about 2,500 of the nation's approximately 6,000 hospitals -- 103 in Kansas -- are being surveyed. But Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services officials said they expected the number of participating hospitals to increase to 3,900 by next year.

Tension expected

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said there is an "understandable tension" between providers and employers that pay for health care about how fast to move toward greater transparancy.

"There is this tension between the MDs and the MBAs," Leavitt said.

But he said the movement toward greater transparency and accountability is essential to both improving the quality of care and stopping what he called an unsustainable escalation in costs.

"Health care is beginning to undermine the capacity of our country to be competitive in the world," he said.

In Kansas, the challenge of convincing hospitals to participate is different than in other states. Kansas is home to 83 Critical Access Hospitals, facilities limited to 25 beds that were designated specifically to provide care to Medicare beneficiaries in rural areas. That is more than any other state.

Though only 15 Kansas hospitals of that type are currently providing the quality and patient satisfaction data used on the Hospital Compare site, Kuhn, an Emporia native, said the information coming from them is interesting.

"What we're seeing is that smaller, rural hospitals tend to have higher patient satisfaction scores," he said.

n Jim McLean is a staff writer for KHI News Service, which specializes in coverage of health issues facing Kansans. He can be reached at jmclean@khi.org or at 785-233-5443, ext. 123.